finds in this invention all the elements of design, as it appeared in the
thought and action of a human designer. First, conjecture of certain laws
or facts in optics. Then, experiment proving these laws or facts. Then, the
contrivance and formation of an instrument by which those laws or facts
must produce a certain sought result.
Thus enlightened, our skeptic turns to his crystalline lens to see if he
can discover the work of a Dollond in this. Here he finds that an eye,
having a crystalline lens placed between the humors, not only refracts the
light more than it would be refracted by the humors alone, but that, in
this combination of humors and lens, the colors are as completely corrected
as in the combination of Dollond's telescope. Can it be that there was no
design, no designer, directing the powers of life in the formation of this
wonderful organ? Our skeptic is aware that, in the arts of man, great aid
has been, sometimes, given by chance, that is, by the artist or workman
observing some fortuitous combination, form, or action, around him. He has
heard it said that the chance arrangement of two pairs of spectacles, in
the shop of a Dutch optician, gave the direction
67
for constructing the first telescope. Possibly, in time, say a few
geological ages, it might in some optician's shop have brought about a
combination of flint and crown glass which, together, should have been
achromatic. But the space between the humors of the eye is not an optician'
s shop where object-glasses of all kinds, shapes, and sizes, are placed by
chance, in all manner of relations and positions. On the hypothesis under
which our skeptic is making his examination--the eye having been completed
in all but the formation of the lens--the place which the lens occupies
when completed was filled with parts of the humors and plane membrane,
homogeneous in texture and surface, presenting, therefore, neither the
variety of the materials nor forms which are contained in the optician's
shop for chance to make its combinations with. How, then, could it be cast
of a combination not before used, and fashioned to a shape different from
that before known, and placed in exact combination with all the parts
before enumerated, with many others not even mentioned? He sees no
parallelism of condition, then, by which chance could act in forming a
crystalline lens, which answers to the condition of an optician's shop,
where it might be possible in many ages for chance to combine existing forms
into an achromatic object-glass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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